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CHAP. 38. (21)—EELS

Eels live eight1 years; they are able to survive out of water
as much as six days,2 when a north-east wind blows; but when
the south wind prevails, not so many. In winter,3 they cannot live if they are in very shallow water, nor yet if the water
is troubled. Hence it is that they are taken more especially
about the rising of the Vergiliæ,4 when the rivers are mostly
in a turbid state. These animals seek their food at night;
they are the only fish the bodies of which, when dead, do not
float5 upon the surface.

(22.) There is a lake called Benacus,6 in the territory of
Verona, in Italy, through which the river Mincius flows.7 At
the part of it whence this river issues, once a year, and mostly
in the month of October, the lake is troubled, evidently by the
constellations8 of autumn, and the eels are heaped together9
by the waves, and rolled on by them in such astonishing multitudes, that single masses of them, containing more than a
thousand in number, are often taken in the chambers10 which
are formed in the bed of the river for that purpose.

1 Spallanzani, in his "Nat. Hist. of the Eel in the Lagunes of Comacchio," says, that immediately after their birth they retreat to the Lagunes,
and at the end of five years re-enter the river Po.

5 Aristotle, Hist. Anim. B. viii. c. 75, says the same, and likewise that
they feed mostly at night. The reason for their not floating when dead, he
says, is their peculiar conformation; the belly being so remarkably small
that the water cannot find an entrance; added to which they have no fat
upon them.

8 The setting of the Pleiades or the rising of Arcturus. See B. ii. c. 47.

9 Spallanzani informs us that the fishermen of the Lagunes of
Comacchio form with reeds small chambers, by means of which they take
the eels when endeavouring to re-enter the river Po; in these such vast
multitudes are collected, that they are absolutely to be seen above the
surface of the water.

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